“Oh God.” Her hand flew to her lips as they shook, a sob suddenly tearing from her as he reached for her, pulled her into his arms, and held her gently. “Oh God, Rafe. I miss him.” Agony pierced her voice. “I miss him so much I don’t know if I can bear it.”
Holding her, rocking her, Rafe felt his chest tighten with pain as she cried against him, wondering if perhaps he shouldn’t have told her.
He and Tye had talked a lot that day, and his friend had told him that the day would come when he might believe it was time to tell Jaymi the request Tye had made of him. Rafe thought it was time, but hell, he’d been wrong before.
“I wouldn’t have survived without you,” she whispered tearfully against his chest as he rubbed her back, kissed the top of her head gently. “I couldn’t have been here for Cami. I couldn’t have protected her in the last year, Rafe, if you hadn’t done as he’d asked.”
She sobbed softly, the never-ending pain he knew she felt filling the air around them.
“I’ll always be here for you, Jaymi,” he promised her as her head lifted. “For both of you.”
Damp eyes stared back at him, filled with misery and loss.
“Thank you, Rafe.” She reached up, touched his cheek, then laid her palm against it gently. “One day, someone will love you the way I loved Tye. I know they will.”
“I hope not, Jaymi,” he whispered, meaning every word of it. “Love like that comes with far too much risk.”
And she shook her head, the smile that curved her lips suddenly filled with life, with the memory of love. “I wouldn’t have missed it for the world, Rafe. Even if I had known one day he would be gone, I wouldn’t have missed it.”
And Rafe knew, Tye had felt the same.
His friends had been two parts of a whole, and with Tye’s death, there were times Jaymi seemed almost crippled with grief.
But in her eyes, in that moment, he saw another side of it. A side that held no regret. That loved so deeply that the pain was worth it.
And he promised himself, swore to himself, he’d never love that way. He’d never let another person in that deep. He’d never allow himself to be broken by losing them.
Two weeks later
The bronchitis was getting worse.
Jaymi sat beside Cami’s bed and read the thermometer worriedly. Her temperature was edging over 102, her sister’s face was flushed, her lips dry, and fever glittered in her dove gray eyes.
“But you were getting better,” she sighed as Cami stared up at her with overbright eyes.
“Lost my medicine,” her sister admitted, struggling for breath as she coughed again, the labored, rough sound worse than it had been when her sister had showed up at her doorstep earlier that day.
Their mother had sent her to the apartment, a good twenty-minute walk from the house that would have taken Cami much longer as she labored for breath.
She glanced at the clock, willing the doctor to call her back about the prescription before it was too late. She worked at the pharmacy, but still, Mr. Keene wouldn’t like it if she had to let herself in tonight to fill the prescription.
If he were in town, he would have come in himself and done it, she knew. He liked Cami. Hell, everyone liked Cami, except their father.
“How did you lose your medicine?” Cami’s answer perplexed her. Her sister wasn’t an irresponsible child. She’d been forced to grow up young, and hadn’t had the luxury of being able to forget the simplest things. Mark Flannigan, their father, had little patience for teenage angst or forgetfulness from his youngest child.
Cami shrugged at the question and turned her gaze away to stare at the wall on the other side of the bed.
“Cami?” Jaymi touched her sister’s chin gently to turn her gaze back to her. “What happened to your medicine?”
“I don’t know.” Her dry lips trembled as her eyes filled with tears. “Dad came in the bedroom and he was upset because there were dirty clothes on the floor and the tissues were on my table. I think he threw them away when he started throwing everything in the trash.”
Jaymi’s lips thinned.
She knew better than to call him, or to appear at the house furious over it. Mark always had a way of making it look as though it were Cami’s fault, or even pretending innocence.
While he did, their mother would stare at him in resigned accusation before mumbling about taking her medicine and heading for her bedroom.
She wasn’t going to allow this to continue, she decided. Once Cami was better, they would go to the house and pack her things before bringing them to the apartment. Cami was being neglected in the most despicable way. Even worse, Mark was risking her health. He had to have known he had thrown the medicine away. That wasn’t something that was done by accident, and she knew Cami wasn’t a messy child. She was too neat for her age and Jaymi couldn’t believe there had been enough tissues on the bed table for Mark to have missed the bottle of pills and the cough medicine.
She just prayed the doctor was willing to fax the prescription in to the pharmacy before Jaymi broke several different state and federal laws and refilled the prescriptions herself.
She would not allow her sister to suffer more tonight, and the hospital was more than an hour away. After the wreck she’d been in the week before, she was wary about driving the mountain roads.
There shouldn’t have been anything wrong with her brakes. There had been no reason they would go out as she started down the mountain, causing her to nearly crash over one of the sheer cliffs that dropped to a boulder-strewn ravine below.
It had been sheer luck that had kept her from going over. That and the fact that a rock slide from the cliff above the road had caused the state to clear a wide area on the other side of the road to make room for debris.
She’d managed to steer her car to the other side and the very fact that she hadn’t been going fast had possibly saved her life, Joe Townsend had told her.
But he had acted oddly. He’d refused to look her in the eye, and Joe was the type of man who looked a person in the eye. But when he’d warned her to be careful, and she had taken it as a warning, he’d been more commanding than concerned.
“Jaymi, watch what you’re doing,” he told her fiercely. “Don’t be taking any chances.”
She hadn’t been aware she was taking any chances. At least not in her car.